Lebanese Canadian artist Joyce Joumaa and London-based artist Rhea Dillon have been awarded the 2025 Baloise Artwork Prize at Artwork Basel. The award winners will obtain CHF 30,000 ($36,700), and their works shall be donated to European museums MMK Frankfurt and MUDAM Luxembourg.
Given out yearly within the Statements part of Artwork Basel’s Swiss honest, the Baloise Artwork Prize acknowledges two rising artists displaying solo shows. This 12 months’s jury included Karola Kraus, director of mumok Vienna; Bettina Steinbrügge, director of MUDAM; Susanne Pfeffer, director of MMK Frankfurt; Susanne Titz, director of the Museum Abteiberg in Germany; and Swiss artwork collector Uli Sigg.
Joumaa, who was included within the 2024 Venice Biennale, acquired the prize for Periodic Sights (2025). The work is an set up of repurposed fuse containers containing pictures from Beirut and Tripoli. The sunshine containers simulate Lebanon’s common family electrical energy entry—usually restricted to 2 hours every day—highlighting the social affect of infrastructural collapse and conflict.
Born in 1998, Joumaa lives between Beirut and Amsterdam. She is exhibiting at Artwork Basel with Montreal’s Eli Kerr Gallery..
“The popularity from the Baloise Prize has already begun to open doorways for Joyce, and the gallery is honored to be included within the legacy of the excellent artists and galleries that acquired the award,” gallerist Eli Kerr advised Artsy.
Dillon was acknowledged for her “Leaning Figures” sequence (2025), comprising wall-mounted sculptures that incorporate resin-cast crystal plates caught to molasses and Jamaican soil. These works are held in containers made from Sapele mahohany wooden, which was utilized in slave ships, a symbolic nod to the fabric traces of colonialism.
The British artist, born in 1996, is displaying with London’s Smooth Opening gallery—whose stand received the prize for the second 12 months in a row. Dillon’s observe, which spans poetry, filmmaking, sculpture, and portray, often explores supplies that symbolize her Caribbean and British identities.
Previous winners of the Baloise prize embody now well known names. These embody British German artist Tino Sehgal, South Korean sculptor Haegue Yang, and the late multidisciplinary artist Suki Seokyeong Kang, who handed away earlier this 12 months
